During the peak lunch hour in the middle of Jerusalem, at the Machane Yehuda shuk today, the arrival of a new food truck caused quite a bit of rukus. Calls to “come get your meat” on a loudspeaker, and girls passing out small sandwich bags, brought about large crowds expecting to get a free taste.

Meet the Meat was a typical looking roadside food truck, with a large kosher sign. The difference was that rather than selecting your cut of meat from the cow diagram, there was an image of the female body. Each portion of the female body was labeled and numbered. The menu consists of sexually descriptive names of the female anatomy.

If you were to take one of these free sandwich bags, you’d find a very graphic story of various women who resort to prostitution for income. It also describes the type of client they serve, as well as the sexual services they provide. The sandwich inside was not edible, and was an unpleasant raw piece of meat between a bun. It was quite shocking to all who approached the truck, which was obviously the point.

A little-known fact that many learned today is that prostitution is legal in Israel, but there is very little legislation addressing the issue. For instance, the buying or selling of sex is completely legal, but the profit of those services cannot involve a 3rd party. In other words, it’s an individually run business – no pimping allowed.

The legalized status in Israel is causing the industry to soar, and the demand for more prostitutes is a huge concern. “Beautiful young men and women end up trapped in the life of prostitution” explained one of the activists. The organizers of the demonstration explained that they hoped to shed light on the problem, and promote bills currently being presented that introduce the “Nordic Model.” The Nordic Model approach to prostitution (also known as the Sex Buyer Law) decriminalizes all those who are prostituted, provides support services to help them exit, and makes buying people for sex a criminal offence, in order to reduce the demand that drives sex trafficking. “If we remove the legalized status of prostitution in Israel, we believe it’s an important step in solving the problem” said one of the young women handing out the sandwich packs.

NGO plans to oppose efforts to renew the Pussycat club’s license.

The Tel Aviv Municipality revoked the business license of the well-known Pussycat strip club in late April following prostitution allegations and an NGO is planning to oppose efforts to renew their license.The revocation follows a petition filed by the Task Force on Human Trafficking (TFHT) in the Tel Aviv District Court in December and police findings that sex services were provided in private rooms in the club.

In the petition the NGO claimed that the strip club, one of Israel’s biggest, operates as a brothel for all intents and purposes, with prostitution occurring in the club’s private rooms. Undercover police activity in the club revealed alleged sex services provided in private rooms with the owners allegedly taking an NIS 100 cut of the prostitution payments. Some of the club’s workers were foreign tourists in Israel, without legal status, the NGO said.

A court hearing on Thursday is scheduled to determine the conditions of giving the club a new license.

The club also demolished the private rooms, where the alleged prostitution occurred, and thus the police will not oppose renewing the license, attorney Avital Rosenberger-Seri of TFHT said.

A police spokeswoman did not return a request for comment.

“But our stance is if this place for the last 10 years operates as a brothel there’s no way they will do anything else,” Rosenberger-Seri told The Jerusalem Post.

The club’s owners deny any prostitution in the building, “It is not and has never been operated as a brothel club,” they said in a statement.

“The municipality is beginning to internalize what has been claimed by field officials for a long time – strip clubs, such as the Pussycat, are brothels sponsored by the law,” Rosenberger- Seri said, “We welcome the importance the municipality sees in eradicating prostitution, but the way to eradicate it is to incriminate customers and the fundamental message that we must have legislation. The body of a woman Is not a commodity and consumption of prostitution harms women, men, and society as a whole.”

TFHT accused the Pussycat of being a “gateway” for prostitution in Israel where woman are recruited from across the country as strip dancers and then exploited for prostitution.

A number of strip clubs in Ramat Gan and the Baby Dolls club in Haifa were closed due to prostitution allegations.

“Something is twisted inside, mediocre sex like in a puppet show, you have to work too hard,” “A midget, not a great face, a bimbo,” “Suggests sex with her husband present; older, looks terrible.”

These are detailed descriptions of prostitutes from their clients’ perspective. The “critiques” were submitted by a member of the online Hebrew portal Sex Adir (“Great Sex”), aimed at consumers of sex for pay. These descriptions, which included nicknames identifying the women, were accompanied by a call for a “consumer boycott”: “If every one of us would stop going to girls that don’t deliver the goods, the results wouldn’t be long in coming,” the writer suggests.
As in many realms, the internet has also changed the way sex is consumed. Nowadays a client can get information about a “discreet apartment” or arrange sex for pay on his own in a manner even more private and discreet than in the past. Moreover, the anonymity the internet provides allows clients to find each other, support each other, disseminate information and conduct themselves as a community. In other words, the internet is the new pimp.

“When we speak about the sex industry, there’s a type of triangle – the prostitute, the pimp and the client,” says Yeela Lahav-Raz, who wrote her doctorate on the Sex Adir portal, which contains several different forums. “In the past the pimp had a lot more power in this equation because he was the one who mediated, traded and sold. Today a sex client can surf the site, which acts as the pimp in terms of making information accessible. It has also shifted a great deal of power to the sex consumer at the expense of the pimp.”

Lahav-Raz, 36, who teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and at the Tel Aviv Academic College, says the Sex Adir portal has 18,764 registered users, all consumers of sex for pay, and that over the past year there has been a sharp increase in their number. “When I started my research six years ago there were around 11,000 users,” she says. “In the past year alone there were 4,000 new ones. This is a very large increase, and of course does not reflect the overall number of sex consumers in Israel, only those who choose to share their experiences on the forums. Most sex consumers don’t share.”

Lahav-Raz became interested in the sex industry a decade ago, when she was doing research for her master’s degree on the sociology of the home and its significance for the homeless teens being helped by a center for young prostitutes run by the Elem association for youth in distress.

“I had planned to write my doctorate on teen prostitutes,” she says. “But when I went out to the street for the first time with the Elem car that cruises through areas of prostitution, I was struck by the presence of the johns. When we think of prostitutes we think of the prostitutes, but the client is faceless and nameless, an amorphous, abstract entity, protected by the gloom.”

One objective of her research was to analyze the significance of the texts written by the sex clients. “On the surface the declared purpose of the forums is purely consumerist in nature,” Lahav-Raz explains. “‘I’m a consumer like any consumer and I want to get better service at a lower price.’ And how do they achieve this? By uniting as a consumer community … through which they can exert pressure to reduce the prostitutes’ prices.

“But that’s just the declared, open purpose,” she continues. “In fact, the forums serve as a confessional for sex consumers. The internet facilitated their transition from single, isolated consumers to an active community of anonymous members. Because of the anonymity component the sex consumers can share their sexual experiences. They also share the difficulties they have – for example impotence during sex with a prostitute or guilt feelings about cheating on their partners, the fear of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, fear of being caught, and more. What has developed is not just a confessional space, but a type of support group that serves as a therapeutic self-help environment.”

Lahav-Raz divides the sex clients on these forums into three groups – the consumer, the hunter and the addict. The consumer has a neoliberal, capitalistic outlook and is aware of his power as a consumer who aims to “improve the terms of service.” Many prostitutes are in fact aware of the forum and know that they will be subject to criticism and oversight, she says. “They know if they don’t give ‘good service’ as defined by the forum members they will get bad reviews that could harm their livelihood.”

The hunter holds antiquated ideas about the man as the hunter and conqueror, she says. “They call the prostitutes names like ‘street cats’ and ‘street dogs.’ It shows that they see them as wild animals … which makes it legitimate to use force with them and relate to them as inhuman.”

The addict, she says, “defines himself as a victim responding to his drives. Defining himself as an addict frees him from all moral responsibility because from his perspective it’s like a drug controlling him. They are focused on their own suffering.”

She says that these users get support and sympathy from the group. “The empathy is not for the prostitutes, but for themselves.”

Lahav-Raz has also examined how prostitutes react to these online discussions.

“It’s clear that this environment multiplies the resonance of the exploitation and humiliation, since suddenly 19,000 people are reading about people’s sexual experience with the prostitute, ranking her body, reading about how her genitals smell and about their weight and whether their home is dirty – these are all things clients write about.”

But interestingly, she notes, the forum also provides a platform for the prostitutes to fight back.

“Prostitutes have slowly begun to enter the forums and respond,” says Lahav-Raz. “During an actual encounter with a client they would never react that way; he might not pay, he might rape her or get violent. But in the online forum they dare to and are able to express themselves.”

Lahav-Raz has identified ways in which the prostitutes have begun to use these forums strategically. “One of the amazing things is in their posts they try to hit back at the clients, often with humor; they rank the client to show them how it feels to be ranked. They write, for example, ‘The client was hairy, he smelled awful, he was stingy and argued a lot.’ They are using the same tools. I don’t believe that this breaches the wall or brings about a change in the power structure, but this is a very intelligent use of this arena, demonstrating their understanding of the discourse and concepts, in the hope that it can provide
little sisterhood.”

Thousands of Israelis have promised to put up cash to help an Israeli journalist facing millions of shekels in legal fees for libel for posting a disparaging Facebook update about an Israeli developer who is a convicted human trafficker.

In the space of less than two days, more than 3,000 people, mostly journalists and but also members of the public, have rallied to the defense of Sharon Shpurer, a former reporter for Haaretz and its business daily, TheMarker. Organized by the Journalists Association, the supporters committed each to pay 560 shekels (about $150) to defray the cost of any judgment rendered against her so-called SLAPP suit filed by Urban Real Estate, which had been owned by David (Dudi) Digmi, a figure who was convicted of trafficking women. The signatories’ commitment was conditioned on 3,000 people ultimately signing on.

On a cumulative basis, the commitment would amount to about 620,000 shekels. For purposes of comparison, 400,000 shekels was raised within a day in a crowdfunding effort to fund the defense of Elor Azaria, the Israeli soldier charged with manslaughter for shooting a prone and subdued Palestinian terrorist. In Shpurer’s case however, the commitment secured was to defray a portion of a future judgment against the reporter rather than a contribution up front in her defense.The lawsuit against Shpurer is seen by some as a so-called SLAPP suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation designed to silence or intimidate. The suit by Urban Real Estate is seeking damages of 1.68 million shekels in connection with several comments that Shpurer posted on her Facebook page in which she called the company “dubious” and called on members of the public not to patronize the firm due to its owner’s former crimes.

Shpurer had written a series of investigative reports for Haaretz and TheMarker relating to Digmi and his partners. Digmi was arrested and convicted in Belgium of trafficking women. He then fled to Israel through the Netherlands were he again faced human trafficking violations, in addition to a rape charge. Digmi then became a witness for the state and most of the charges against him were dropped. Shpurer’s Facebook post referred to a real-estate company which Digmi founded during the time of his offences.

The commitment signed by those supporting Shpurer read as following; “I willingly take upon myself the possible financial responsibility to support free journalism in Israel, the public’s right to know and the desire to create a public force against the threats being posed to journalists attempting to hold big money accountable through such a SLAPP suit.”

Opposition lawmaker Miki Rosenthal (Zionist Union), who as a filmmaker also faced such a suit, voiced his support for the initiative, saying “I recommend that all those who hold free press dear to join and help Sharon Shpurer in her battle against the SLAPP suit filed by the Urban real-estate company.”

Non-sex work at a brothel is still selling sex. Plus there’s the danger of a violent customer, while male managers make the big money. If only Israel’s courts understood.

Over the course of a year, Meital, a 35-year-old single mother, ran a brothel – a “small and solid” place, she says. “I rented a simple furnished apartment in a poor, neglected and crumbling building. I published an ad and employed a woman as a prostitute. I started with one and moved on to two as things developed,” says Meital – all the women’s names have been changed for this story. “The place was open from 9 A.M. until 4 P.M., when I would answer the phone from my other job, and when there wasn’t any interest in the morning, the place was open in the evening.”

The picture she describes is similar to the one painted at the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court last month when a ruling legalized prostitution on the condition that the venue be rented by several women together, or by one woman who invites other women to join in. Meital was one such woman. She rented an apartment and ran her business.

Actually, Meital went into that business due to a raft of crises in her life. These included a violent partner, rape, physical and emotional wounds and drug addiction. She worked for minimum wage and started the brothel to finance her drug habit. After a year, she says, “a known criminal arrived. He asked for protection money and I refused.” Her visitor then locked her and her two employees in the apartment for three days. “I reached an understanding with him,” Meital says. “He would open a big brothel and I would manage it.”

This is how Meital became the manager of an establishment that employed 12 women as prostitutes, but she didn’t enjoy the promotion. “I made mounds of cash – some 100,000 shekels [$25,900] every month – but everything went to the drug dealers and was spent on shopping as a way to compensate. I was unhappy, desperate. Today I feel like throwing up. I’m very ashamed of what I did.”

She served a prison sentence for pimping and running brothels after refusing a plea bargain that would have commuted her sentence if she turned in the man she worked for. “I preferred to keep quiet because it was clear that if I mentioned his name I wouldn’t remain alive,” she says. Meital’s story is one example of a trend in response to stricter legislation against trafficking in women in recent years: The men stay behind the scenes and put the women out front in managerial positions.

According to Roni Shapiro, the director of Israel’s rehabilitation unit for female prisoners, “The men still run everything and control everything, but from a distance, from a safe place. The women move to the forefront, and they’re the ones in danger of being jailed.”

The judge’s dream world

Most brothels in Haifa and the north are run by women, “behind which hides a male world of criminals,” Shapiro says. “The women are at the bottom of the hierarchy and remain exploited. Even when they’re supposedly advancing to a secretarial job – manager of a brothel, pimping – the men are still the ones who take in the big money.” Shapiro says she doesn’t know of a case in prostitution in which women run their own place. “Those who bring them into the position of brothel manager are men. He’s the origin of the wealth, he’s the one who pushes everything from behind the scenes, and many times he doesn’t let the women stop,” she says. “The cooperative of women in prostitution without a pimp like those the judge legalized simply doesn’t exist. If they tried to create such a model, the criminal world would take control of it in an instant and use them as pretty faces.” Stav, who began her journey in prostitution during her military service, says it’s not a one-way street and some women go from prostitution to management and back. It’s convenient to have women in management because “it’s an outsourcing of the masculine pimping institution.” She too helped manage a brothel and stopped a few months ago. She remembers the efforts to mollify her.

“The owners of places keep special lawyers,” she says. “I remember that a well-known lawyer in the field came and briefed us at the brothel – what to say in case of a police raid. He encouraged us, saying there was nothing to be afraid of. The owners pay the fines and they run a strong system of persuasion.”

Putting women out front is also convenient because they can use a motherly approach to win the trust of prostitutes. Neta, 26, started working at 21 as a secretary, and after two months moved on to work as a prostitute. “I wasn’t in touch with my mother and the pimps recognized my needs very quickly. We would drink coffee after work and meet on Fridays and Saturdays; she would come to my place and I would go to hers,” Neta says. “When I had financial troubles she gave me a loan and another loan. This mother type of pimp is a game, and when my eyes opened I realized she didn’t really care about me; it was a tactic. She only cared that I made her as much money as possible.” Over the past six months, Neta was rehabilitated with the help of a program run by the Social Affairs Ministry and the Tel Aviv municipality.

“There are women pimps who are cruel and exploitative and do things in a rough way, and there are some who use a honey trap,” says Lilach Tzur Ben-Moshe, director of Turning the Tables, a group that helps women who leave trafficking and prostitution. She says women who work as pimps “bring warm food to the hostel and try to create a ‘mama image.’ It’s not unusual to hear young women say about a female pimp who’s very exploitative: ‘She’s like a mother to me.’” “They give loans to women and act as if it’s purely out of a desire to help, when actually they enslave them with the interest payments,” she says.

Hierarchy of earnings

Stav says there’s a crucial difference between a receptionist and being a manager. “A clerk sits in the brothel, surrounded by telephones and women,” she says. “She answers clients’ phone calls with a warm, caressing and sensuous voice, and essentially markets the prostitutes to them – details on which sex acts they perform. She entices the client to come to the place.”

The receptionist is responsible for the cashbox and daily operations, and usually she receives base pay of 300 shekels per shift plus tips. Some places don’t give base pay and the wages come from the tips paid her by the prostitutes (if she supplied them with more clients), and bonuses from the owners, depending on the number of clients. Stav says that for a 12-hour shift, base pay ranges from 500 to 1,000 shekels, and on weekends at the big brothels it can be as much as 3,000 shekels.

The directors oversee the receptionists and are responsible for recruiting the women and running the business. They’re in charge of payments and advertising, and the incoming cash is delivered to them. They make anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 shekels per month. “Because all these places are equipped with a network of cameras and microphones, some of them supervise everything long-distance,” she says. “They watch their employees and make comments. Others come to the place and oversee everything from up close.” Naama Zeevi-Rivlin, manager of Saleet, a Tel Aviv shelter for prostituted women, says a very thin line separates the women’s roles. “We have clients who were in prostitution, and when they got pregnant they became receptionists. As soon as someone is suddenly missing for a shift, they’re called in to fill the position,” she says.

“Being a receptionist is like being a prostitute, only verbally – she isn’t physically touched, but she has to sell sex and seduce the customer. They’re under a lot of stress because of the potential dangers – a police raid, a violent customer bursting in, and just the fear and shame of being exposed. It’s a steep emotional price.” Zeevi-Rivlin says the court’s decision gives criminals a legal way to keep on hiding behind women in prostitution and women pimps, as if these women were operating independently.

According to Anastasia, who works as a prostitute, “Everything has changed. It used to be that pimps would buy women and pimp them like animals — drug them, imprison them, beat them up. And now you have girls that used to be exploited in prostitution exploiting other women.” She herself once ran a brothel and says she knows a woman who runs four places in Tel Aviv. “But I know there’s a man behind it and it all really belongs to him. She’s just a puppet,” Anastasia says. “She rents the location and does a renovation that costs 100,000 shekels. What women in prostitution has 100,000 shekels? Even if she worked for 20 years, she wouldn’t save that much.”

The Coalition Against Prostitution Statement Regarding the Closing of the Brothel at Yitzhak Sadeh 36, Tel Aviv

On Monday, May 30th a verdict was finally given regarding the brothel on 36 Yitzhak Sadeh Street, Tel Aviv. His Honor Judge Hermelin’s ruling is an excellent example of the anomaly that exists in Israel’s current prostitution laws. In a feat of legal gymnastics, the judge arrived at the only possible conclusion of the proceedings, a 90-day shut-down of the brothel (the maximum amount of time allowed by law).

We welcome the closure of any brothel. This is especially true regarding the closing of the Yitzhak Sadeh brothel, one of the largest and well-known commercial sex operations in Tel Aviv. We are of course aware that the brothel will likely resume its activities after the 90-day period and its customers will be directed to another brothel in the meantime, as was the case with the closure of the 98 Hayarkon brothel following the suicide of one of the prostituted women there. Shortly after the closure, the clients were referred to another brothel on Levinski Street. That said, we hope that this will provide a window of opportunity, even if for just one woman, to leave the cycle of prostitution.

The message of the verdict is clear: the voices of women in prostitution are important and our current laws do not offer them real solutions for coping with the trap of prostitution. Yes, for many women prostitution is a trap. The law addresses only offenses associated with prostitution that have significance to the “public order,” but do not address two key aspects of the issue – the customers who fuel the “sex industry” and the women desperately in need of help to escape it.

This legal lacuna creates a complicated judicial reality that is exploited by pimps, and allows for the de facto legalization of prostitution. It is the women in prostitution, who suffer from emotional, physical, domestic and social abuse, who pay the price for this situation.

According to Judge Hermelin’s ruling, if a number of women decide tomorrow morning to collectively establish a “sex cooperative,” they should not be prosecuted. As professionals deeply familiar with this legal process and having worked for years to provide psychosocial, medical and legal aid to women in prostitution, we know that this ruling ignores the facts of the reality. In reality, there is no free will in prostitution; and there is no prostitution without subjugation to another person. In reality, the road to prostitution is fraught with perpetual violence – be it physical, sexual, emotional and economic – against its victims.

A verdict that precludes the closure of brothels run by women and exempts law enforcement agencies from thoroughly investigating their avenues of exploitation is a significant step in the direction of the legalization of prostitution in Israel. In order to prevent the institutionalization of prostitution, we must act immediately. The time has come for the Knesset and government to support the criminalization of the purchase of sexual services and to provide for the rehabilitation of prostitution victims as well as the prevention of prostitution through education on human dignity and gender equality. We commend Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who expressed his support for such legislation.

Justice Ministry to mull the popular ‘Nordic model’ of criminalizing the frequenting of sex workers, but Israelis aren’t sold on the idea

You may glimpse them lingering, all decked out at Tel Aviv’s decrepit old bus station, loitering around the train station in Beersheba or soliciting customers on Haifa’s coastline. But apart from the occasional headline (such as when a long-time prostitute hanged herself in a Tel Aviv brothel), tucked away in so-called “discreet apartments,” Israel’s some 12,000 sex workers in the NIS 1.2 billion ($318 million) industry are largely invisible to many Israelis.

But the issue may soon head to the Knesset: The Justice Ministry announced last week it will form a committee to evaluate whether to criminalize paying for sex, broadly modeling itself on such countries as Sweden, Norway, and, as of earlier this month, France. The director-general of the Justice Ministry, Amy Palmer, will head the committee, and representatives from other ministries will be on it as well but have not yet been appointed, according to Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s spokesperson.

While prostitution itself remains legal in Israel, pimping, sex trafficking, and running a brothel are punishable by law. The formation of the committee follows nearly a decade of efforts by female lawmakers to spearhead legislation to criminalize clients, primarily by Meretz’s Zehava Galon. From the other side of the aisle, the Jewish Home party’s Shuli Moalem-Rafaeli has recently backed her attempts. While it remains to be seen what the committee will recommend, if anything, the unlikely pair of lawmakers has in the past suggested fines or up to a year in jail for clients, with the option for first-time offenders to attend seminars on prostitution in lieu of criminal proceedings. Galon and Moalem-Refaeli are also proposing expanding welfare services for prostitutes. (In 2012, a similar bill by Galon and Kadima MK Orit Zuaretz was supported by the key Ministerial Committee for Legislation, but the government dissolved before it could be taken further.)

However, recent polls show Israelis may not be entirely on board with punishing people who hire prostitutes, even though they believe it will discourage the phenomenon. Meanwhile, critics have warned the bid would effectively demolish the notion that women have the right to sell their bodies, may worsen their conditions as prostitutes are forced to go underground, and creates an asymmetrical justice system that punishes clients but exonerates prostitutes.

According to the first comprehensive study of sex workers by the Welfare Ministry last month, most of them are Jewish, Israeli, mothers, over the age of 30 and from the former Soviet Union, and they entered the industry for financial reasons. On average, they see 5.5 clients per day. And 76 percent want to get out.

‘Every day I want to die from this work’

The Welfare Ministry report estimated there are some 11,420-12,730 sex workers in Israel, 95% of them women, 89% of whom are over 18. Between 970 and 1,260 (11%) are minors. The figures place the number of prostitutes per 100,000 Israelis at 121-128 — less than countries such as Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Sweden; more than the Czech Republic, Ireland, Norway, Denmark.

Some 97% of the women hold Israeli citizenship, and 86% are Jewish. Most are over 30 (70%), have at least one child (62%), and a slim majority (52%) were born in the former Soviet Union. The majority entered prostitution due to financial woes (66%), and 7% due to drug addiction. One-fifth have a college degree.

Some NIS 510 million ($135 million) is made annually in the 265 “discreet apartments,” 43% of the total yearly sum (1.2 billion in 2014) generated by the industry. Escort services racked up some NIS 220 million ($58 million) and massage parlors that offered sexual services NIS 190 million ($50 million). Street prostitution generated just NIS 70 million ($18 million) in yearly earnings, some 6% of the annual total. Some one-quarter of Israeli prostitutes see more than seven clients a day (the average is 5.5), according to the report.

Financial straits were found to be the force driving women to prostitution (66%), and for most (71%) it was the reason they stay (the remaining 23% said because “it suits them”). Most of the women said they want to leave (76%), 10% said they don’t, 7% don’t know, and 7% said “not right now.”

“The kids are getting older and already asking where Imma [mother] goes at night. I can’t keep lying all the time and tell them I’m a bartender,” said one anonymous participant in the poll, which interviewed 609 women face-to-face (all are cited anonymously).

“I’m sick of it. It’s very difficult, psychologically, you know. It’s not easy every day, every prostitution experience is unpleasant, I don’t get used to it. In my mind, I’m not a prostitute,” said another.

‘The kids are getting older and already asking where Imma [mother] goes at night’“Every day I want to die from this work,” added a third.

Some were more noncommittal. “I don’t know — when I have money, I’ll leave. At least a million,” said one.

“I wanted to, but I looked into other work. Cleaning is not suitable for me, [prostitution] sometimes is,” the report quotes a woman as saying.

“Not really. Maybe when I get older, I’ll want to leave, and then maybe I’ll be a secretary.”

Others were insistent it suits them just fine: “I feel like this is my most productive period, and I also have patience for it. Then (28 years ago), I did as if I was forced to. Life forced me to. But today I do it with pleasure.”

(For the purpose of this article, a distinction is made between prostitution and sex trafficking, with the latter already illegal, although there is likely overlap. On sex trafficking, the US State Department in 2012 upgraded Israel to “tier 1” on human trafficking, indicating that the government complies with the minimum requirements to prevent the phenomenon, while urging it to impose stricter punishments on those behind it.)

Are all prostitutes victims?

Punishing prostitution clients was first introduced by Sweden in its 1999 Sex Purchase Act, which has since been adopted by Norway, Iceland, Canada, and Northern Ireland, and requires consumers to pay a fine or face up to six months in jail. Defending the apparent contradiction in making buying sex illegal but selling it legal, Sweden contended that prostitution is essentially an act of exploitation and violence by the customers, who hold a position of power and should bear the brunt of the penalty.

The debate was subsequently exported outside of Sweden, leaving countries divided on the issue. “Don’t liberate me, I’ll take care of myself!” a sign brandished by a sex worker on April 7 read, after France ruled a $4,000 fine would be levied on the clients of prostitutes.

Echoing the Swedish argument, Galon on April 18 maintained that “prostitution is sexual violence and enslavement of women, and in the vast majority of cases does not provide a livelihood for the women but rather for the pimps.”

“The deceptive liberal discourse about the right of women to sell their bodies ignores the power relations in the world of prostitution, and the power relations in the world as a whole. Prostitution, in its current form, can only exist in an unequal world in which it’s still okay to enslave women for men’s needs. A society that permits buying the bodies of women is broadcasting that all women can be bought,” she argued.

‘The deceptive liberal discourse about the right of women to sell their bodies ignores the power relations in the world of prostitution’Outlining the opposition to plans to punish clients, researcher Yehuda Troan in a 2008 Knesset report noted the asymmetry in penalties was “problematic” to some.

“There are those who have fundamental reservations about the model of one-sided criminality, since it gives an exemption to the prostitutes who are also partners in the forbidden action. One-sided criminality is liable to send a message that a woman is permitted to work in prostitution, or could be interpreted as a social statement such as this, which is problematic to many,” he wrote.

Other issues listed include a problem of enforcement, since Israel’s police have a limited budget. The law will make it difficult to compile evidence, since prostitutes may be wary of cooperating and inclined to protect their clients, he argued. Moreover, a law against the clients could make it increasingly difficult for the security services to crack down on those running the operations, since it compromises the testimony of many of the witnesses, namely clients. Finally, it could force prostitutes to go underground, resulting in worse conditions, he maintained.

A September 2015 poll by the Welfare Ministry of 754 Israelis found that 54% were generally in favor of “legislation against the clients of prostitution services.” But when asked more pointedly whether clients should be “punished,” the figure dropped to 42%. The vast majority of respondents (83%) said the government ought to work to curb prostitution, but slightly more were in favor of the government permitting brothels to operate with regulation (59%) than those who support an outright ban (52%). In other words, the Israeli respondents were in favor of some sort of legislation, but likely one that wouldn’t include criminal penalties.

Support for punishing those who hire prostitutes was up compared to previous polls (22% in a 2007 Knesset poll commissioned by Galon were in favor; 43% in 2013), but the Welfare Ministry report noted that “it isn’t clear whether the change is a result of the phrasing (criminalizing vs. punishing) or that there increased support for punishing the clients.”

That isn’t to say Israelis don’t generally find prostitution harmful. Some 81% in the 2015 poll said it is a phenomenon that compromises human dignity, 70% agreed it is a social phenomenon that harms relationships between men and women, and 74% said they believed sex workers can’t leave this cycle without help. Israelis also believe the prostitutes frequently experience psychological harm (87%), physical harm (76%), rape (70%), and robbery (60%). At the same time, 55% said women have the right over their bodies, including to sell their bodies, and a majority were against punishing the prostitutes themselves (63%). And half (54%) said laws punishing the clients will reduce the phenomenon.

Touching on the disparity between public opposition and views of its efficacy, the 2008 Knesset report concluded: “Although the public’s views and expectations do not precisely forecast the legal influence, it appears the fact that most of the public does not believe that the client should be criminalized attests to a view of prostitution as legitimate and widespread dangers of noncompliance with the law, and therefore contempt of the law. On the other hand, it appears that the fact that most of the public sees that the proposed legislation will reduce the scope of prostitution strengthens the argument that the stigma of the crime that accompanies criminalizing the client — alongside educational and advocacy — is likely to effect normative, societal change.”

It also underlined a question about the relationship between the lack of public support and legislation: Should legislation reflect societal change, or create it?

The report cites Dr. Noya Rimalt of the University of Haifa, who testified in a 2007 hearing that although it’s better that public awareness drive legislation, there were cases in Israeli law where the laws drove the conversation, such as the strict sexual harassment laws in the 1990s and the ban on smoking in public areas.

“An educational process should precede legal change,” Rimalt said at the time, adding that “it doesn’t always work like that.”

Government agencies aren’t cooperating enough and more sex workers are arriving from Eastern Europe than before, the report by Hotline for Refugees and Migrants says

Human rights organizations are identifying far more victims of human trafficking than the state, a rights group says in a new report. According to the report, prepared by the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, about 80 percent of trafficking victims from the asylum-seeker community were identified last year by human rights organizations rather than state agencies. The Hotline itself identified 28 African asylum seekers as trafficking victims who had suffered torture in the Sinai Peninsula en route to Israel. At the organization’s urging, the state recognized 19 of them as trafficking victims, and four were released from Saharonim Prison.

The report adds that last year saw a rise in the number of women who came to Israel on tourist visas from Eastern Europe and were put to work in the sex industry. It says 11 such women, after being arrested on suspicion of engaging in prostitution, were deported by the Population, Immigration and Border Authority without any coordination with the police or examination of the circumstances that brought them to Israel. Even though the administrative tribunals that deal with such cases have harshly criticized this lack of coordination, there have been no signs of any improvement, the report says.

Over the past decade, Israel worked hard to improve its handling of human trafficking in order to earn a Tier-1 ranking on the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report, Hotline says. And as long as Israel was trying to improve its ranking, state agencies were careful to coordinate in an effort to end human trafficking. But in recent years, cooperation between the population authority and the police has deteriorated, the report says.As a result, women arrested for prostitution are sometimes deported even before police have questioned them to find out whether they were trafficking victims, making it impossible for the police to find the traffickers.

The recent decision to allow visa-free travel from Ukraine and Moldova made it harder to monitor human trafficking from those countries, the report says. The report notes that for the past few years, the Justice Ministry has run courses for both judges on administrative tribunals and prison staffers on how to identify victims of trafficking and torture. Still, Hotline activists have repeatedly identified trafficking victims who were missed by prison staffers and tribunal judges.

“The numbers show that the perception of trafficking as something that has been eradicated in Israel has prevented the authorities from taking action against the new face of this phenomenon,” Hotline director Reut Michaeli said in a statement. “The characterization of women working in prostitution as offenders who have to be deported, not as survivors who need rehabilitation, is problematic and reminiscent of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period when the trafficking of women in Israel was at its peak.”

The Justice Ministry said it only heard of the report when asked about it by Haaretz and wanted to study it before responding. Nevertheless, it added, the ministry department that coordinates the fight against human trafficking has overseen fruitful cooperation between all the relevant parties, including state agencies, the Knesset, Israeli NGOs and international organizations. It said this cooperation had been underway since the department’s establishment in 2006 so that “human trafficking has been significantly reduced in a manner that has gained international recognition.”

The police similarly said they hadn’t received the report and therefore couldn’t comment, adding they had no idea what the statistics were based on. But they said they were fighting trafficking resolutely in close cooperation with other state agencies and with scrupulous attention to the rights of both suspects and victims.The population authority said that as soon as someone is identified as a trafficking victim, he or she is treated as per the regulations.

A “major advance” for human rights and women’s rights was how French Prime Minister Manuel Valls described the law passed by his country’s parliament on Wednesday, making it illegal to pay for sex in France. From now on, engaging the service of a prostitute is a criminal offense that carries a fine.The goal of the law is to discourage prostitution by penalizing the clients rather than the prostitutes. Sweden was the first country to adopt this approach, passing a similar law in 1999. Other countries with laws of this kind include Norway, Iceland, Canada and Ireland.The law that outlaws prostitution and shifts the criminal burden to the customers has drawn international attention, particularly in light of the failure of regulation of the industry in the Netherlands. The trafficking of women has increased, together with organized crime. In Sweden, prostitution has not been eliminated, but studies show that the number of female sex workers in the country fell by two-thirds and the law has stopped women from entering the industry.

Legislation criminalizing the clients represents a revolutionary approach to prostitution. First, it declares that prostitution is a form of violence against women. In addition, there is increasing recognition of the criminal responsibility of the client in contributing to the success of prostitution. He collaborates with the pimps and crime organizations that use his money to grease the wheels of the industry. Customer demand shapes and influences the sex industry and the characteristics of the victims of prostitution, including their young age.Criminalizing the client changes the entire legal and social approach to the phenomenon; the social and legal disgrace moves from the prostitute to the client, and it is he who is now subject to sanctions, condemnation and public criticism. It stresses the harm done to women who engage in prostitution, to all women, and to society as a whole, and it makes the debate over illusions of “choice” and “consent” superfluous by acknowledging that those caught up in the cycle of prostitution don’t have real choice. The discussion is focused on the damage prostitution causes and how to prevent it.

A bill in the spirit of the Swedish legislation promoted by Meretz party chairwoman Zehava Galon was passed in a preliminary reading in the Knesset in February 2012. Galon and MK Shuli Moalem-Refaeli (Habayit Hayehudi) will resubmit it when the Knesset convenes for the summer session, with added provisions for rehabilitating sex workers.

We can only hopes that Israel will demonstrate ethical and social responsibility for human rights and women’s rights and join the global trend of adopting the Swedish model. The time has also come for Israel to clearly declare, like the other states that have adopted this approach — the customer is the criminal.

ATZUM-TFHT facilitated the English translation of an Israel Channel 2 interview with Dafna Leil, Knesset Correspondent. The interview, which initially aired in March 2016, related to the current composition of the Knesset and the relatively encouraging chances for the passage of Nordic Model legislation by this government. The proposed legislation, authored by TFHT, is now being promoted with the cross-party collaboration of MKs Shuli Moalem-Refaeli (Habayit Hayehudi) and Zehava Galon (Meretz).

The segment also featured an interview with Vika, one of the only survivors of prostitution in Israel willing to be interviewed and photographed without concealment. In addition to appearing within the media, Vika also attends discussions about prostitution with the Knesset’s Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality and speaks to groups about her personal experiences and the abusive reality of prostitution. Vika is also a participant in TFHT’s empowerment program, conducted in partnership with NGO Ofek Nashi for women who have left, or are in the process of escaping prostitution.